[HONG KONG] China's Huawei Technologies aims to become the world's third-largest data storage provider by 2018 as it takes market share from leaders such as EMC Corp and International Business Machines Corp.

"We don't want to just be No 1 in China...We want to be at least the top 3 in the world by 2018," Huawei's storage product line president Fan Ruiqi told Reuters, referring to the global market for data-storage, which was worth US$5.3 billion in the second quarter.

Huawei had a 3.3 per cent share of the global enterprise storage sector in the second quarter, a distant seventh after market leaders EMC's 32 per cent, IBM's 11.7 per cent and NetApp Inc's 10.6 per cent, according to market research firm Gartner.

REUTERS